The man who paved the way for Jim Boeheim

Roy Danforth was overseeing a budding power at Syracuse, which he led to a Final Four in 1975. One year later, he left for Tulane.

Jim Boeheim’s 47-year tenure as Syracuse’s men’s basketball coach ended last Wednesday in unceremonious fashion.

In the hours after the Orange lost to Wake Forest in the second round of the ACC Tournament, capping off the kind of middling season that had come to define the legendary coach’s final years on the sideline, Syracuse announced that Boeheim would not be returning next season. The man who had been coaching at his alma mater in some capacity since 1969 and who had become so synonymous with the university was suddenly gone.

Even as a deeply flawed individual – his first week of retirement life reminding us of as much – Boeheim’s work in building up Syracuse stands as one of the most impressive accomplishments in college basketball history. In his nearly half-century there, he won 1,116 games, second only to Mike Krzyzewski in men’s Division I history, and led the Orange to five Final Fours and a national championship.

There are any number of ways to properly contextualize just how long Boeheim had been at Syracuse, the kind of social, cultural and political mile markers that serve as a stark and sometimes humorous reminder of how much time had passed. When Boeheim was hired as the Orange’s head coach in April 1976, the first film in the Star Wars series was 14 months from being released. Days before Boeheim’s promotion, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the Apple Computer Company.

Then there’s this piece of trivia – the coach Boeheim replaced left Syracuse, a program that now has the sixth-most wins in NCAA Division I men’s basketball history, for Tulane, which has made the NCAA Tournament just three times ever.

If Roy Danforth’s coaching odyssey seems too difficult to believe, it’s worth taking a closer look at it.